April Fool's Day prank: Twitter 'launches' premium service Twttr

With all major Internet companies playing different pranks on users, how could popular social network Twitter stay behind. The company announced that it's making Twitter a two-tiered service, introducing a new paid premium 'Twitter' service that lets users tweet if they pay $5 a month. The fun part was that users who don't move to the paid service can continue to use the 'Twttr' version of the social networking service free of charge which will not allow them to use vowels in their tweets.

Twitter even justified the reason for allowing only consonants saying that eliminating vowels will 'encourage a more efficient and "dense" form of communication'. It illustrated the basic service with a mockup of the most retweeted Tweet of all time without vowels.

The blog post goes on to (pseudo)pacify users saying that the vowels in URLs will remain free for everyone, forever and that users can also Tweet in non-Latin characters based languages, like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic or Korean, which will remain unaffected by the service change.

The prank was not just limited to the consonants - vowels bit. Twitter also announced that it would offer a single character extension, expanding the length of a Tweet to 141 characters for advertisers who use Promoted Products. It said that the price of the extra character would be based on a bidding system reflecting the popularity of the character the advertiser would like to add.

To induce more laughs, the blog showcases mock up of tweets from popular users and quotes Michael Sippey, VP Product at twitter who talks about the inspiration behind the new changes. The blog post also links to a page that automatically transforms Tweets into a Twttr friendly format (without vowels), which welcomes users with a 'Happy April fool's day' message. However, the page does function as promised and removes vowels from tweets!